Chapter Text
Warmth should not be in a place like this.
Despite being scorched by fire from an exploding murderdozer a few hours before, the curls of steam that lay thick in the air were a welcome bliss, though one that felt deeply wrong in Carl’s present situation. Hot showers were an uncommon luxury in his life, given his extended periods of time spent either on boats or stubbornly refusing to rack up the water bill.
The last time he had one, strangely, was quite like this. Or, at the very least, he’s experienced a particular mindset very similar to his current one: a disconnected, somewhat out of body sensation, undercut by intense grief and anger lingering from his very heated phone call with Bea. While she celebrated New Years’ Day in the fucking Bahamas, he had graciously volunteered to stay home and watch her stupid fucking cat for her, refusing the idea of a beach while he remained practically bedbound from debilitating cramps.
“Fine! Fuck you, Carl. Maybe I WILL go sleep with a real man while I’m here! See you never, asshole!”
The words echoed faintly in his mind, tinny, as if through a child’s can and string “telephone”. Just like the disgusting water coming off of his body, they eventually pooled around Carl’s feet before gurgling slowly down the drain. He wished he knew how much of it was his. Usually he could use the amount of red in the bathtub to gauge how many more days of hell he had left.
He had a long, long stay ahead of him, from the looks of it.
Much like that shower a few days ago, the blood and pain was somehow the least of his worries. Fuck, the breakup was also the least of his worries right now. Even if Bea had survived the collapse, which he really doubted, he didn’t think there was a shot in hell that he could find her from a quarter of the way across the globe. Even with whatever crazy alien magic the Master Splinter guy had just explained, surely there was no way or reason for someone to be moved across several states worth of territory.
Then again, he currently had a cat with him that had reformed from a pile of meat sludge and now talked. So maybe nothing was out of the realm of possibility.
Despite his earlier insistence that him and Donut should split up if she was going to be, well, a catty little bitch, she remained firmly near the top of his priority list. He knew he wouldn’t forgive himself if he abandoned someone that had had sentience thrust onto them mere hours ago. Even less so when that someone was the cat he had lived with for the last few years, growing quite fond of her despite himself. Leaving her to fend for herself would quite literally feel like personally taking Old Yeller out back and, well, …you know.
There were worse people (individuals? Beings? It was all so confusing.) to be stuck with when you need incredible violence to survive the foreseeable future, he supposed. Though that opinion might rapidly change depending on the very uncomfortable conversation he was about to have with her once he dragged himself out of the disturbingly calming shower.
Did cats even have a concept of gender? Donut clearly had some grasp on it, given her insistence on being called a princess. And he supposed that Bea, for all her faults, had always seemed rather supportive of himself and the general existence of trans people.
“Maybe I WILL go sleep with a real man while I’m here!”
Well, at least somewhat.
The timer floating in the very edge of his vision, somehow ever-present but also not, ticked down another minute. He knew damn well that if he wanted to stay alive that this, too, needed to be shoved WAY down on his list of priorities. Which meant getting the cause of immediate distress out of the way sooner rather than later.
He managed, after fruitlessly trying to mess with the confusing knobs, to turn the shower off with his newly discovered mental “click”. With no extra pads on him (why would he have any, he ran outside in the middle of the fucking night) and with his new alien overlords apparently oblivious to the basic goddamn biological functions that half of all humans suffered, he settled for carefully wadding some toilet paper in his boxers, trying not to use too much since they apparently only got a limited supply. Despite how long he had stood under the running water hoping for it to clear itself out, he could already feel the sticky drip of spotting begin the moment he pulled his stuffed boxers back on. It would have to do until he could find, hopefully, a change of underwear and some actual pants. Assuming he survived that long.
Before he could talk himself out of it, he walked out of the bathroom and back into the strangely decorated “safe room”, which looked mostly like a hodgepodge of furniture from various motels, possibly South American in origin, within a decently sized room carpeted in the most hideous acid orange he’d ever seen. He wondered if this environment had somehow been pulled out of the fucking 70s. Donut, of course, was already in there, lounging on the lone bed and delicately licking her paws, even though she had presumably just cleaned herself in the other bathroom just before. Carl halfheartedly puzzled over what her bathroom instance looked like, given that he knew firsthand how much she hatedbaths. Maybe just a giant, barbed cat tongue would hang on the wall to lick the gore off for her.
“I think you missed a spot, Carl,” she said, still grooming herself, “I still smell a bit of blood on you.”
He grimaced. He’d hoped that, somehow, in gaining humanlike sapience, perhaps her feline senses would have been dulled. Obviously that was not the case.
“No, Donut, that’s just. Comin’ from me.”
Finally, the cat looked back at him, pausing her constant licking. Carl involuntarily hunched in on himself at her piercing gaze, hoping but not actually believing that the magical shirt he’d been given would obscure his…unfortunate chest situation.
“Mordecai literally just explained how to use those healing spells we have,” she tutted. “I’m sure whatever lingering fireball llama malady you have will be whiffed right away with that. Seriously, Carl, did it curse you with some form of ridiculous skin growth in retaliation for taking its meth?”
He tried his best not to let his eye twitch. She didn’t know—she was literally just a cat until three hours ago, for fuck’s sake.
“It’s not an injury,” he explained, gingerly sitting on the far side of the bed. He grabbed a pillow to press against his front in an attempt to ignore its existence. “It’s unfortunately just part of my body. You normally don’t see… these… ‘cause I prefer to keep them taped or bound. But the tape I had on got soaked in blood and shit, so…”
Donut continued to stare at him for a few moments, her owlish eyes glowing in the semi-dark of the room as she examine him. She gasped.
“You have BOOBS, Carl?! Like Miss Beatrice and her mother and that lady neighbor of ours she’d sometimes go into your bedroom with?!? She had rather big ones, as I recall hearing several times.”
Carl had nether the time nor heart to get worked up about apparently yet another of Bea’s affair partners. “Yeah, Donut. I have… boobs. Not really like those women though. I’m still a man.”
He took a deep breath for the next part, partly to steel himself and partly to stave off the pressure that was slowly gripping his lower abdomen. He wasn’t sure if this particular facet of his terrible luck entering this place was any better or worse than the chest situation, just that he would launch himself headfirst into the nearest monster if any of this ended up on that stupid recap show Mordecai had talked about.
“The, er, remaining blood is my stupid—” He coughed over the final word, hoping it might obscure it from any invisible microphones. “—period.”
“Oh. Well.”
Donut continued to stare at him, and Carl had to clench his jaw to resist from putting a physical barrier between himself and the cat.
Finally, she sniffed, looked away, and started licking a new paw. “I suppose that is better than a llama’s contagious turbo breast cancer and permanent thigh wounds. That would doom our reputation before its even begun.”
A relief washed over him, though he still eyed her warily. As long as he got all of this out now, he could lock it back up again and continue to deprioritize it to focus on survival. Distractions were deadly.
“I take it you’re okay with that then,” he said, aiming for casual and missing by several leagues. The ‘and with me?’ went unsaid, but Donut was likely smart enough to pick it out anyways.
“Goodness, Carl, the fact that your masculinity is threatened by this already makes you undoubtedly a man. Having boobs and occasionally bleeding doesn’t make you special, or else plenty of men on those police shows Miss Beatrice watches would be secretly women.”
He further bristled at that, but he managed to recognize the slight apology for what it was. Donut was still a cat, he reminded himself. He had to expect love bites and a “playfully” swatting paw.
“Mmkay, well. Uh. Just want you to know this doesn’t change anything about me or how you might want to talk about me.”
“Of course not, Carl!” Donut rolled over and stretched atop the covers, both sets of paws nearly spanning the entire area between the headboard and footboard of the dingy, possibly IKEA-made, iron bedframe. “There is room for only one woman in this duo! Two would be far too dramatic. Not to mention attract a far different fan-base than what I have in mind.”
Carl sighed one final time and decided that that was the best he was going to get. He leaned across the bed to lay near his cat and tried to give her a few belly scritches before she shot him with a withering glare. Guess it was a no brainer why her “Magic Missile” came out of her eyes.
“Well, g’night Donut,” he yawned, moving back to rest on the ridiculous number of pillows that appeared to be a constant for all hotel beds. “After breakfast tomorrow we need to go level up or something. Look for a way down to the next level. I dunno. Make sure you get a full… however much sleep a cat needs. God fucking knows what we’re gonna face out there.”
“Probably more rats. Feels like a waste since I could probably have killed those even before this whole mess. OH! Do you think we might encounter some dogs, Carl? I can’t wait to kill a stupid Cocker spaniel with a magic missile. Or you can stomp it into tiny little pieces!”
She continued to rant about the possible mobs that she felt deserved their imminent violence. Carl, on the other hand, rolled over, shut his eyes, and tried very, very hard not to imagine being watched by thousands of unseen eyes seeing him at his worst, staring right at and through the sticky, matted blood that he had already accepted to be a permanent accessory for the foreseeable future.
--
As promised, the following morning started with a lovely fish breakfast for Donut, some sort of meat and egg and sauce dish for Carl, and eventually a semi-reluctant venture beyond the two havens they had discovered.
‘This is supposed to be a game,’ Carl had to keep reminding himself, endlessly frustrated when they kept finding dead-end hallways or opening puzzle-locked doors for the chance to kill three stupid scatterers (that didn’t even have any gold!). A fucked up, terrible, sadistic game that surely didn’t have the reach or influence that Mordecai had implied, but a game nonetheless. Eventually they’d be rewarded for this stupid grinding, like they had yesterday after he smushed the dumb meth llama and took its shit.
He shuddered at the reminder of that particular achievement. It was bad enough that he could almost tangibly feel the invisible eyes pinned on his form, so slightly and yet so vastly different than the day before. Now he was aware there would be at least one “person” permanently looking at his stupid goddamn feet.
Somewhere between blowing up a bunch of goblins and trying to look for a new path to take, he noticed a thin, pinkish square of plastic wrapping among the occasional random piles of junk along the halls. He picked it upon recognizing it, only to be immediately disappointed (and a bit disgusted) when a couple dead roaches fell out of it instead of a pad. ‘Course it couldn’t be that easy. He figured he and Donut had better find a bathroom before he started bleeding through the only article of clothing protecting his bare ass from the stale dungeon air.
As they backtracked to where they had last seen one such area, he noticed at least two more pad wrappers (empty, of course) and a few tampon applicators (also pre-used. Yay!). Despite him not mentioning literally anything about these finds, Donut began pointing out the increasing frequency of menstrual products as she spotted them.
“Do you think we might find a treasure chest of supplies for your monthlies?” she asked, nearly whispering the last word as if it were a curse. Carl didn’t know where the hell she might have picked up such a regressive vocabulary OR attitude for period terms. He suspected it might have been Downton Abbey. Or Bridgerton. Bea watched those nearly as often as stupid reality tv shows about hot people taking vows of celibacy and being stuck on islands or whatever.
“I dunno. I think that would be kind of a shitty prize for the last few hours of grinding,” he grumbled, hoping that it wasn’t too obvious how desperate he was to receive exactly that. He wasn’t sure if reverse psychology would work on the dungeon’s System AI, but he was more than willing to try.
“Here, check this door,” Donut said. “It looks charming! And most of the junk piles seem to be gathered in this direction.”
She pointed at a red, wooden door to their left that Carl was certain had not been there the first time they’d passed this way. It had a few white daisies painted in a chain pattern at the top, as well as a cartoonish butterfly and bee with weird smiley faces and black dotted lines behind them to indicate a looping flight path. The corner of another pad wrapper, this one in an almost medical-feeling pale blue, peeked out from underneath, temptingly. Too temptingly.
He weighed the options in his head silently, even as Donut tried to use her claws to Ratatouille his shoulder towards the door. The brutally sparse lack of rewards as of late might mean that the proverbial carrot hanging over their heads had been saved up for something actually useful like this. That same carrot could also very easily be bait to lure him into a room full of bugs, force him to stomp them into a fucked-up roach wine, and then have to suffer the dungeon’s creepy groans and mild earthquakes afterwards. It had rewarded him well after the last few smushes though, so maybe it would be worth it.
He shuddered. Curiosity could quite possibly kill the cat, but he hoped to god that if it came down to that, then satisfaction, fucked up and weird as it was, might be able to bring her back.
(Ideally it would stop her from dying at all, actually. Whatever. He’d never been too good with metaphors.)
Carl shot a useless, frustrated glance at the ceiling, scowled, and reached to open the door.
--
What. The. Fuck.
The cat had been slaughtered for the sin of wondering. Sacrificed. Brutalized. Fucking cremated.
Not literally, of course. Unlike the (now dead) proverbial cat, Donut remained perfectly safe on his shoulder, every hair on her body raised despite the stinking garbage juice, scatterer guts, and human fucking blood that clung to her fur as a thick, gory dampness. And she hadn’t even been physically engaged with the Boss OR the mobs, only screaming her head off in Carl’s ear and blasting the enemies with magic missiles when she could. He didn’t even want to consider what he might look like right now.
Still, the Hoarder fight had, as Carl could quickly tell, definitely killed something dear to him. Something fleeting that had stuck with him until now, a last line of desperate abstraction and compartmentalization that his brain had put in place to shield him from the horrors of this fucking dungeon. He’d felt the sudden loss as it had been stripped away while he stared into the pleading woman’s eyes and choked her to death. He hadn’t understood her, not really, but still. He’d known. He’d known she had been a person. Without understanding any of the words, he’d seen with perfect clarity that she had looked at him with an initial hope before the boss music kicked in, so relieved to see another human.
Another woman, a years-old voice in his head told him, returning with a force and volume that he hadn’t felt since finally starting on hormones a few months ago. It felt like it had been years since then. Another loss hit him, one that he’d been anticipating since his conversation with Donut last night. Perhaps since he went into the entry stairwell in the first place.
Despite his rational mind telling him that they really needed to move on, Carl couldn’t stop himself from mourning that never got the chance to feel quite right in his own skin. Mostly prickling, sometimes debilitating, but ever-present. An itching reminder plucked right out of the uncanny valley. His outsides would never quite line up with his insides, only imitate that unattainable ideal, and he had to carry himself around every day while desperately hoping that people would see past it and allow him to exist in the comfort of the version of himself he knew to be true. Part of him wondered if the now-dead woman who’d existed before all the horrific changes had experienced that same revulsion upon realizing what she had become. What she’d been turned into.
Carl suddenly felt very, very naked, and very, very angry.
He’d seen the list of achievements come in upon entering, then finishing, the boss battle. He pushed them away in disgust. The parchment textured window popups were blocking his field of view. They needed to loot this place and leave as quickly as possible—Donut had already gone to get stuff from the mobs she’d killed, and he knew once she was done he was going to scoop her up, go find the goddamn tutorial guild again, and shake Mordecai until he answered exactly how the fuck this could be entertainment for any sentient creature in existence.
But neither Mordecai nor any other NPC was here right now, and neither were the faceless showrunners of this fucking hellscape. Only the body of what had once been someone probably very much like him.
Without consciously thinking about it, he dug around in the junk piles until he found some articles of clothing. Nothing that would fit him, of course, because fuuuuck his stupid goddamn life. Still, he managed to scrounge up a lacy, once pink but now brownish-grey, Victoria’s Secret branded bra that had to have belonged to a stripper before all of this—one with apparently the maximum size of breast implants. Carefully, hoping to avoid getting anything else particularly disgusting on him, he placed it atop the dead woman’s artificially engorged breasts. He briefly considered trying to find a way to equip it on her, partly so that it would attach properly and partly because he knew that touching the masses of flesh that had probably been molded for a few laughs out of immature teens made him want to vomit. He tried to quell it by mentally repeating his teenage guidance counselor’s mantra of “bodies are bodies no matter the form”.
Another achievement popped up in his periphery. He pushed it away.
He lingered for another moment, gazing at her while he looted her body. Thought another, quiet, “I’m sorry” as he left a ratty blanket that was in her inventory on top of her limp form, even though he’d already concealed the “private” bits from the invisible, ever-present eyes.
Upon their exit from the junk-filled room, Donut broke the silence to quietly ask why had done that. His first, instinctive response—a muttered “I don’t know”—died on his lips. Even if she wasn’t human, he knew now that Donut was still a person as well.
“She was turned into an exaggeration of someone she wasn’t,” he finally replied, hushed, glancing around for an invisible microphone he knew he wouldn’t see. Would they kill him for showing sympathy for the enemies that had been made from his own people? Was that not entertaining enough to warrant keeping him alive? “I don’t know who she was before the collapse, or if anyone who knew her is still alive, but the way she gets remembered shouldn’t be as…that. They no longer get to change her or take away more of her dignity more than they already have. Whoever is running this damn place never deserved that ability in the first place, and now they don’t have it as long as we know better.”
She’d rest in peace. Comfort, maybe, if they were fortunate enough to have something like that awaiting them after death. But most importantly, she would no longer have to be seen as something she never was. Even if she was dead and probably couldn’t care about the endless gazes and perceptions of their unwarranted audience, she was free from their scrutiny. It was the best any of them could hope for now, he supposed. Himself and Donut and all the other crawlers included.
Carl knew he wouldn’t be able to do this for every human-adjacent boss or mob they fought. He knew Donut had been impatiently waiting to leave that room (he didn’t blame her), and he knew that the AI might start punishing him if he got too melodramatic. More importantly, he knew his psyche wouldn’t be able to take that much grief and rage that frequently.
But this woman was the first, likely of many more to come, which meant he could spare a moment to do the human thing—the right thing. He felt, amongst the pain and anger of it all, a certain levity as he buried a part of himself with her. It would remain there, tucked away in that room until the floor collapsed, and likely even afterwards as an indelible mark upon each constituent atom of the environment. The proof they were there, that this new reality had not yet reached them enough to become numb to the cruelty of it all, that nothing that existed on Earth was as irreversibly malleable as this place wanted them to believe.
Carl and Donut moved on.